When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth - Softcover

Eberstadt, Fernanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860464416 ISBN 13: 9781860464416

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Dolly Gebler, midwestern heiress, is dedicated to the idea that art can change the world. Alfred, her husband, a poor boy from Brooklyn, loves nightclubs and tequila, and believes he has married a woman for whom everything is appearances. Into this world comes Isaac Hooker.

About this title

Review:

The lives of rich folks dabbling in the New York art scene of the 1980s makes for surprisingly entertaining reading in When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth. Fernanda Eberstadt mines this fertile ground with fierce and funny results. Her cast of characters: Alfred Gebler, a poor boy who made good by marrying an heiress with a passion for the avant-garde; Dolly Gebler, daughter of a Midwestern pharmaceutical mogul who inculcated his favorite child with the view that obscene wealth requires penance--preferably in the form of a non-profit arts foundation; and Isaac Hooker, a young innocent from New Hampshire: painter, Harvard drop-out, former soup-kitchen cook, and part-time framer who enters the Geblers' orbit with unpredictable results.

Half the pleasure of reading Eberstadt's novel is her masterful send-up of the patrons and poseurs who populated New York's overheated art scene during the Reagan-Bush years; the other half is in the unsentimental, yet sympathetic portrayal of her main characters. Frequently funny, always penetrating, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth offers a delightful journey into a world most of us only experience through the pages of glossy magazines.

From the Inside Flap:

hor of Low Tide and His Devils comes a brilliant novel about the high-flying New York art world of the late 1980s. When a brash young artist enters the lives of a couple of well-to-do patrons of the arts, the excessiveness of everything begins to threaten what is most dear to them.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1860464416
• ISBN 13: 9781860464416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400